THE FUNDAMENTAL BLOK

“What are our demands for redundancy?”

London, at the end of Millennium: “this great bloated sack, containing boxes within boxes of universes, seeping into each other, clogged and wheezing at the seams, sucking centrifugally at the world…” Avram Blok, Released from both madness and healing, returns as a teacher of movie editing to the London Academy of Film on the brink of its own imminent closure. The “Blokbook,” his unfinished compilation of tall tales and new Internet anarchy, beckons in his Shepherds Bush sanctuary.

But the Fundamental Blok cannot be released from his bondage: His private woes over lost love and human entropy are interrupted by the arrival of fellow malcontent Joe Dekel, author and subject of ragged Middle East thrillers in which the true terror of the modern State of Israel is reflected in thinly veiled fiction of double and triple agents. Blok is cast again into his new-old quest for ultimate answers, in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Cairo and the Australian Outback, dragging the imaginary into the real with phantasms both imagined and real: from Karl Marx and the Renaissance martyr, Giordano Bruno, to the Space Ape of Cape Canaveral, who advances from his first moment of enlightenment in space to his escape to the circus and a bold attempt at a congressional career…

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THE FUNDAMENTAL BLOK was written between 1997 and 2004, an inevitable return to the anti-hero left dangling in the crusader ruins of Acre at the end of THE DAYS OF MIRACLES AND WONDERS. It grew longer and longer, also swallowing what was originally intended as a third book of the misadventures of Joe Dekel, Israel’s only religious anarchist, as seen in THE DEATH OF MOISHE-GANEF and THE SILENCER, and here subsumed into Avram Blok’s story. The structure of novel within novel, stories within stories, broadened BLOK 5 into a 600 page blok-buster, which the few publishers to whom one dared to submit it committed to the fires of corporate oblivion. And so I frolicked on, among the movie comedians, until the stubborn gene re-asserts itself and, courtesy of myself – here it is. Although it was fully intended to be the last of Avram Blok’s outrages, it too turned out to have a sequel, BLOK 6: THE CHINESE SMILE, soon to appear here also, to complete the Special Edition…

Now available, as the other four reprint Bloks, via the Amazon UK link.